MySMS the Cross-Platform SMS App for All

Today marks the US launch of MySMS, a cross-platform SMS application which enables you to utilize cloud data to sync and back up your text messages across different devices. This application’s goal is very similar to Apple’s iMessage in terms of what it enables you to do, except for the fact that it hits all three major mobile ecosystems rather than just one in the case of Apple’s iMessage.

With MySMS, you can send an SMS from your Android, iOS or Windows Phone. The Windows Phone version is not quite ready yet, but will be available extremely soon (this quarter) according to Martin Pansy, the CEO of Up to Eleven, the holding company for MySMS. In addition to those three, MySMS is also supported on MacOS, Windows, Facebook (as an app), Chrome (as an app) and as a webapp on any HTML enabled device.

MySMS also features an open API to enable developers to integrate MySMS/SMS functionality into their apps as well as supporting full OTT carrier and IM options. MySMS allows you to decide whether or not you wish to send your message over SMS or over their network. For people with unlimited texting, the latter isn’t necessarily attractive unless they have a device like a Wi-Fi only tablet. In the case of such a tablet, you could download and install the Android application and as long as you have internet access appear as though you are texting from your phone.

Currently, the service is available in more than 100 countries and is actively syncing 100 million messages at a constantly growing rate. With the launch in the US, we expect MySMS to continue to grow even more as an alternative application to applications like Whatsapp which don’t actually support real SMS. In areas where data coverage is spotty, MySMS will still work sending messages and once you regain data connectivity it will sync those messages with their servers.

The great thing about MySMS is that the messages are still stored locally and even if MySMS’ servers go down or lose their data, your messages will simply be re-synced with their servers and your messages will be backed up once again. The MySMS model of cloud computing is one that we find extremely interesting, because it is somewhat of a hybrid application enabling both locally and cloud stored data and doesn’t interfere with pre-installed SMS applications that are already part of the device. Not to mention, the application itself is free and will have a premium version which will add more features or improve functionality in a way that would make it worth paying extra without degrading the quality of the free app.

In the past few days that we’ve been testing MySMS we have found the application to be extremely responsive and useful as well as productive. With the installation of the Chrome extension and the use of the webapp, I no longer need to be next to my phone to read or respond to my friends’ text messages. Furthermore, I have a full mechanical keyboard that I can respond to them with, rather than a Swype enabled touchscreen. This not only enables increased accuracy, but it also increases speed as well. So far, we have only had the application crash once, and we have been using it almost non-stop since we started using it a few days ago.

Our only gripes about MySMS at this moment are that it does not support groups and reply all due to being SMS based, however we do hope that as more people begin to use the application, that functionality will be added whenever using MySMS within the application’s network. It also does not allow you to add unknown contacts as contacts into your phone book. In order to add someone that has texted you to your phone book, you still have to go to the native SMS application on your device to add them. We have spoken to UT11 about this gripe of ours and they believe that their application is designed to be created for people who already know the people that they are texting, however, we still believe that this is a flaw of the application and room for improvement. We noticed this issue because we had to do this twice over the course of a few days and were using MySMS as the default texting application.